DVD Studio Pro 3: In the Studio

Converting to a Supported Format

You can use a number of applications on the Mac platform to convert to and from a specific format.

Photoshop

Photoshop can open almost any graphics format. Once the file is open, you can save it as a Photoshop document with layers turned on. See Figure 1-15 in Chapter 1 for an example of verifying layers. Before you save the image, though, you should remember to adjust your image for use in DVDSP. Make sure the image (and this means every layer) is NTSC-safe by applying the NTSC Colors filter from the Video category (refer back to Figure 2-41).

Hopefully, Photoshop is in your arsenal already. If it's not, you really, really need to get it. The custom menus in Chapters 3 and 4 are very difficult to build without Photoshop. DVDSP does understand JPEG, TIFF, and PICT files, so any editing software that can save documents in those formats will work with basic menus. Building layered menus (Chapter 3) or custom shapes (Chapter 10) requires Photoshop documents. No ifs, ands, or buts.

A.Pack

You saw examples of encoding AIFF files with A.Pack earlier in this chapter. Although A.Pack is great at encoding AC3, it doesn't handle a lot of input types. You can use AIFF or WAV formatted files. Beyond that you'll have to convert the audio using one of the other tools mentioned in this section before bringing it into A.Pack.

QuickTime Pro

QuickTime Pro is a $30 upgrade to the QuickTime Player which you can download from Apple. (Actually, you should have received an ...